A boisterous exhibit shines spotlight on S.D.

John Hogan’s “White Sands National Monument, New Mexico,” a 2006 pigmented ink on paper, is one of the spirited works in the MCASD exhibition “Here Not There: San Diego Art Now.” (1996-98 AccuSoft Inc.)

John Hogan’s “White Sands National Monument, New Mexico,” a 2006 pigmented ink on paper, is one of the spirited works in the MCASD exhibition “Here Not There: San Diego Art Now.” (1996-98 AccuSoft Inc.)

The visual beauty of Rendon’s drawings is a kind of counterpoint to their unsettling, hidden content. But some artists simply go for surface beauty, like Tom Driscoll, one of the most long-standing locals in the show. He has installed a long wall of forms cast in cement. Packaging from toys, tools and other things are his sources — “discarded jewels,” he calls them. And his sculptures make them so.

There is even a little bit of the cosmic in “Here Not There,” in the form of “Echo,” Adam Belt’s window form modeled after the South Rose Window from the St. Denis Cathedral in France, which depicts the story of Genesis. Instead of stained glass, it shows us television static, which, he comments, “was caused by cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang.”

But you aren’t going to have your head in the stars for too long in this exhibition. You’ll come across something droll and deflating, like Alison Wiese’s version of a Redwood gazebo, of the ready-to-assemble variety, looking jarringly out of place; or Jeff Irwin’s remarkable ceramic sculptures, in which animals look to be turning into wood, as if in a disturbing dream about disappearing species.

Given the abundance of convincing work in this exhibition, it shouldn’t seem too surprising that eight of the artists in “Here Not There” are also going to be in this year’s California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art — far more than in any previous version of this biennial. It would seem that the era of San Diego artists as underrecognized is about to end.